


Syncretism

by Egon



Series: The World Out There [1]
Category: Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: Bisexual Male Character, Bisexuality, F/M, Incest if you squint, M/M, Multi, Origin Story, Set in Canonverse, Sexuality, Sibling Incest, Slavery, That fiction where Grillby is for all intents and purposes Garnet, Twincest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-16
Updated: 2016-02-16
Packaged: 2018-05-21 01:13:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,117
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6032710
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Egon/pseuds/Egon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is the story of Grillby.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Syncretism

**Author's Note:**

> Finished at an unholy hour when good monsters were making dreams. 
> 
> While this is told from a third person semi-omniscient perspective, it still deals with Grillby's viewpoint in such a manner that I consciously amplified the use of prolonged sentences and multiple synonymous words in series. In doing so, I hope to convey his way of thinking about things before he even discusses how he writes. Quiet waters run deep.
> 
> This fiction contains two "OCs". Of these, one has bearing on his past, the other, on his 'present'; these are here to provide both backdrop and motivation. Likewise, it contains two interpretations of Grillby. If it so pleases you, you can receive this as a "what if" fiction; I don't demand you take fanon for fact. I merely wish to offer a version for your pleasures. Anything else would be imposition.

His name was once Kakra.

He had been strong and fierce and lonely once. He wandered the dunes nakedly and danced with the moon. The sand provided him with glass in the shapes of his footsteps, in the shapes of his breaths, frozen in the gestures of his dances. He first caught sight of himself in that glass, tall and red and new.

The earth was his father, the moon was his mother, the wind was his sister, the distant haze another sister still, and there never needed to be any more than that. What he loved best was the dark and the thunder. It happened so rarely, and the rain stung his body, made him small, so he would seek shelter, flash-burn a mound of sand into an observation glass. 

The storm was a primal force like himself. It brought light and darkness, heat and cold, pain and understanding. There was a storm the night he was born. He remembered unfolding under it, his light before the moon’s, before the sun’s. His light, and that white crackle-flash. The storm was fierce and unforgiving, like himself. It was relentless, and meaningless. It traveled and swept the land and changed things.

~

The tea kettle sings a quiet whistle, and he stands to take it off the heat. Other fire still has uses. He can read while food cooks. He can play his music by candle-light, or by the fireplace. He can remember, while the kettle boils.

Tea is a refined drink. He did not drink it until he met with British expatriates, sunburned red in the face and loud. He had it again in a small cafe, floral, with cream and sugar, Assam. Then, in India, an entire flower blooming in the hot water, before his eyes, an indulgence to the senses. They taught him to roll the leaves gently, keep the flavour contained. The right hand was holy; his dominant impure. The colour of the leaf, the amount it had been rolled and crushed, all this testified to the quality of the end product, and the superior teas never left the country.

He prefers it without modifications. Certain teas call for dilutions of milk, to balance the flavour palate, and then, it is only a trickle. He keeps canisters in the pantry, and pays a young plant monster a premium to try and cultivate a kind of tea down here. The strong flavour comes from sun-dew itself; the tea they breed here is weak to taste. He is not entirely in competition with the cafe. These canisters are largely for his personal use, and he does not often entertain above the bar.

Human satisfaction of fluids and tactile elements comes from chemical burning in fleshly organs, and chemical recognition on the palate. He only enjoys the variations of that burn when the fluid evaporates off his tongue. Tea is best intended as a treat, a small oasis of decadence in the miasma of monotony and what he can only consider a resigned austerity.

~

He once wore his skin bare and free, and he was unashamed and he did not know shame. Later, he would wear clothes for the sake of ‘blending in’, turning his exceptionalism into normalcy. He always knew he was beautiful. The shapely spread of his fingers, long and thin. Sinuous arms and legs. A taut stomach. His hips could swing as easily as sand flowed from the hands, as water trickled down its stream, as fire flickered on a wick.

He moved for his own pleasure, flitted about, and the delight of others was only encouragement to his own confidence. He moved in a way that conserved nothing but showed all, caught eyes, demonstrated his dexterity in ways that human limbs could not move, in ways that human bodies could not participate. He moved this way before he had ever encountered music, the waves of not-light that could interfere with light, that could invoke the sensation of light and dark and depth and warmth, before he had learned to create a voice for himself. Every gesture carried his personality, his voice, his dictates, and he could make himself heard without even the faintest murmur.

~

From the moment he bared himself to the elements, he was rewarded with an understanding of a world that was contrary to his nature and his existence. The air was cool against him, the winds, when they came, were hard and relentless, and it made him small, made him tuck up into himself in hopes of surviving this.

Rain stung his body, each a sharp dart that promised inevitable death were he to remain in its presence. He could not know its cause or its end, only that the instrument of his creation was also the hand of destruction, and that it operated without consciousness, without care. There was no nurturing spirits up there to keep him safe. There was only himself, his own wits and his own terror. To be created without intention was both exhilarating and numbingly cruel. From the very moment he could reason for himself, he instinctively knew that his life and its duration were in his hands. He had no one else to rely upon.

~

They worshipped him. Cults where men had skin dark like ebony had stone reliefs carved of him, or of those who came before him. It did not matter much to him if they could not differentiate, if one was all, or incarnations of the same primordial form. The fire he made for them was blessed, and he was necessary to their way of life. They draped him with flowers taken from the riverside and woven into long garlands. They gave him women on the eve of their marriage, young girls who had experienced their first blood, to bless and purify their bodies, to sate his godly urges.

He was everything they wanted and feared. He was different, deified, better and stranger and terrifying and cruel and majestic and merciful. What he loved best was the masses of them converging, their body heat filling tents and temples, their warmth making the air heady, their scents filling the air, and lingering long after they were gone. As they indulged themselves, the colours and temperatures they provided him were so intoxicating. It could not be harmful. He did not ask for their blood poured out for him, although some still found it fitting to gift that to him. He only asked they engage in the spread of that divine fire, pour out their essence and make new flame in their hearts and their bodies for his pleasure. It was his control, his power, that was the most tantalizing part of it all, and they gave him the power to give and take life as easily as they breathed.

~

His body was nothing to flourish. One glance to him, and any human could see he was not a member of their race. To be different and unnatural was to be hated and feared. To be hated and feared was to be the victim of their insecurities, subject to violence and isolation and terror in tenfold what they must have ‘endured’ to live alongside him.

To this day, he covers as much of himself as he can, even outside the gaze of those who made him an outsider. His outfit comprises of long slacks, and long socks, with garters. He wears a bleached white undershirt beneath a starched and pressed button-down shirt, tamped down with sleeve-garters and simple cufflinks. White fabric bleeds out more light, and must be doubled-up for coverage to be more effective. Sometimes, he doesn’t feel secure unless a vest tops it all off. Regardless of the weather or surroundings, his varied relationships with the clients who frequent his bar, when the sign is lit, the cuffs remain at his wrists, the shirt buttoned, guarded by a black bowtie and two thick, imposing bars of suspenders. He cannot rightly recall how much of his body his current beau has even seen. Relationships tend to be favoured toward coaxing most of the trust from them and returning it with physical compensation for their vulnerability, their surrender. (Submission.)

One of his cats wandered into his bedroom once when he was preparing for work, still in sleep pants. He wonders if it is normal to feel such a strong embarrassment, so many years along. He wonders if, indeed, it was as traumatic for the cat as it was for him. Surely, externally, it was business as usual, shooing the cat out, readying himself for the day, feeding each and every one of the ‘fur babies’, but internally, frozen. There was always an expectation, always a sense of trust and shame and submission in giving even this over. He had little control over his life, but he could have control over this.

~

Coffee is the only drink worth drinking, in his estimation. It has an uncompromising flavour in any of its multitude of forms, and truly, it is a crime, some things that people do to coffee. He loves to watch it trickle down from its filter, or delicately drop from the siphon. To make coffee is an art that must be savoured. It is an experience for all senses. The air is perfumed with its scent. The sound of coffee bubbling. The pleasant sight as the brew strengthens to a natural and deep colour. Warmth and texture on fingers and tongue. The ferocity, like his own. Coffee is a tiger. Coffee cannot be caged, should not be confined. Must be met on its own terms. Is the king of beverages.

He has collected and learned so much about coffee preparation, coffee beans, coffee textures. In an open market in Arabia, they ground it roughly, steeped it with cardamom, bitter and spicy and flavourful the way that an assault on your senses should be. It was a revelation. Coffee in all forms is intriguing, sensual. He cannot go a day without it. He keeps it warm and ready, although no one comes to a bar for coffee. It is his own pleasure.

He drinks his coffee black. If you try to fetter it with milk and sugar, you are only denying its true potential. The strength of coffee does not come from being a component of a weak, watered-down mixture, but from the distillation of its true strength and force. Coffee is a testament to power, and those who drink it, powerful themselves. It is no-nonsense. There is no bullshit in coffee. Raw caffeine and healthful perks are delivered without prissing it up. He could burn on its fumes alone for weeks on end. It is the only love-affair he has actually committed to. As for addictions. Ha. You could do worse. If you live life for pleasure, then why not have it every day? Why not enjoy every moment to the full?

~

He remembers the first time he locked eyes with Her. How he would have liked to say that he met her as an equal, with mutual respect and understanding. She, in her dazzling cocktail dress, backless and sleek, the line of her spine soft curvature and skin lit golden, jade droplets from her ears and her neck and her wrists. But no, the first time he met her was in service to another.

His stature was not proud. His bearing not regal. He was so obviously different, othered, and she was so obviously the pinnacle of everything humankind desired of themselves. They did not speak the same language, so he was stricken with silence to the smooth, sonorous tones, her low laugh. And the way she looked at him was not contemptuous, but approving, lingering, longing. How long had it been since he had been desired like that? An object of affections…. an ideal for someone’s lust… It was like a form of ownership. He felt desire in turn, which informed him of his own particular claim, somewhat negating the uneasiness between their classes.

And how delighted was he, when she framed his turn of service as closer and more intimate connection? He had been owned before, and made free under his own efforts, and now wove himself back into a web of chains, offered her the leash. How she somehow made the unpleasant discovery of her ownership, that document, those physical bonds something less than the horrors that they were? How her own nature revealed to him, long-lived, undying, worshipped as a goddess, a paragon of virtue and renewal, the celestial Feng Huang, the primordial phoenix, all knit itself into perfect complicity, a deception necessary, her monstrosity deified, that which brought them into commonality only making her superior in turn, for she could do what he could not, she could make her way through their world in ways he would never know, she could sit above both man and monster with her cruel painted lips and her black painted talons… 

And service to a goddess. Marriage to an empress. The exchange of black stone fetters and bright, silvery chain for a simple ring, a dedication to eternity… How she wound him around her fingers. How she wove him into her web. How she tightened the noose. She had made the world so delightful to him, made love itself seem like something mortals dallied with in comparison to the strength of their singleminded affections, until it was not the world, until it was nothing at all but her, until his world was a cage, and his efforts for her amusement, and his existence a toy for her long-lived boredoms and short-lived joys.

There was a time when he remembered, so dimly, how he had danced alone for his own enjoyment, and taught himself how to sing. But she was not interested in such juvenile entertainments. He burned hot against her, and she hotter still, and for a while, he wondered if that was not enough, to indulge that single satisfaction, that intoxication and indulgence. There was nothing in that path but destruction, selfish and self-oriented, at the expense of everything in their path, and he had shamefully indulged in that too, to be at once a slave and at the same time a god, to smite without regretting a single soul or a single moment, to quiver under her hand and appreciate the grace of her wings, the wisp of her feathers, the serenity of her embrace in the inferno they built together.

But she had never understood love without violence, never experienced passion without obsession in turn, and if she had cooled to something, she would nevermore return to it. She dallied with every expression of love as he knew it, pleased and preening at the ways he would try to woo, his acts only amusement for the very notion that somehow he, at his position, could win she at hers. He was a poet for her, and a courtesan. In her eyes, he was alternately a god and a mortal, worthy to burrow in her down, not worth the ground beneath her feet. And how exhausting, to win her, to love her, to have her, a whirlwind of young romance, true romance, that eternal bond between them that had somehow taken her quiver of barbs away, blunted her claws, until she could only coo her most tender of love, and he was the hero who had vanquished the monstrous with valiant love and won the heart of a queen. She taught him torment. Oh, how she tormented him. She taught him where pain intersected with pleasure, where something syncretically formed between the dragon and the firebird. She taught him how to loose his discipline, strike out for his satisfaction, for hers, accept even this as de rigueur; her fire lit again with him, the monster renewed with unholy fervor, eager to spread itself in him, eager to entrench its lessons. And she had delighted with him the whole while, a new toy to mould and shape to her whims, all these new and wicked ways they could feed upon each other.

Only in this new bond was he not a slave. Later, he would learn how even the most pure of intentions could be twisted. Later, he would learn that there were non-literal bonds, non-literal fetters, chains that could wind tighter and cut deeper than the physical ones. Physical bonds could only destroy flesh. Metaphorical enslavement could destroy the soul. She had been jade and ruby and gold, artifice amidst so many healthy blooms, and when he freed himself and tore away, shredded and wounded and broken, jaded by it all, rejecting the young and growing sprigs for what was dead inside, he assumed he would not be so stupid as to subject himself to that again.

~

Clearly, he had learned too well. If there was something he was to do, he would master it. If there was a skill he had mastered, then he would put it to use. Within days of arriving in New Home, he was using that skill to start a new life. Within months of arriving in Snowdin and setting up shop, he was using that skill for repairs and provisions. A fair trade of labour, nothing more. There were rules. No touching, no release. No falling in love.

He had customers before he even had a building to cook meals in. He had room and board before he had built his own home above the restaurant. The people here were generous. They were also complicated, and a little dirty. In his experience, everyone was, the smaller the community, the more repressed, the more in need of certain… services. He was filling voids that were left untouched, unmentioned, unfilled, unknown.

It was harder to extract himself from that profession even after he had established a livelihood. Needs must be met in some fashion, and he had become important beyond providing food and warmth. There was a sort of… security in having him take care of them.

Truth be told, he enjoyed it. And he was good at it, he really was. Where he apportioned the top floor for private, personal life when the bar was empty, and the bar itself open, public engagement, the basement was another private affair, appointment only, black card admission. This was nothing to internalize, but when he could display this form of self-control on others, when he was given the ability to control other lives and other pains and other pleasures… that heady power made him feel self-assured once again. Helped him regain his trust in himself. Something else he could invest himself in.

~

Sometimes, he thinks about his daughter. How painful, he reprimands himself. How painful to think of her as a mistake. It wasn’t her fault for existing. It was entirely their fault for making her as the basis of trying to stitch a marriage back together on the mutual affections of something that wasn’t each other.

He wonders if she is enjoying her school. What her favourite colour is. If she is athletic or bookish, or if she is demure or outgoing or tomboyish. With her mother’s charming personality and undoubted singular influence, he expects that Kagari must be a princess through and through, expecting nothing but the best, nothing but what befits her station, heiress to a goddess, the second highest in a strong and terrifying ‘mafia’. Would she be the kind of person to make sure to get her way? Would she be aware of her status and the privileges it entailed?

He wrote her often, when she was older and could write back. He would have written earlier, but there was always a concern that she had been twisted against him and would take only her mother’s word as solemn, singular truth. He still worries that the return address, unchanged since he arrived, would be used against him.

Once, he received a photograph in the mail. She was in a school uniform. Reserved posture. Bookbag slung over an arm, her friends — he presumed they were her friends — were blurs around her, while she was the only one to remain still long enough in the shot. Even so, her fingertips, her head, things a little out of focus.

He thought she would remind him of her mother. She looked more like him. She made him miss everything even more severely, as horrible as it would be to go back to that, as wonderful. He wished, knowing the impossibility of it, that he could be a part of her life.

The photo is one of the most precious things he owns.

~ 

He is a man of restraint.

~

He is a man of compulsion.

~

The first moment that he walked into his bar, he knew there would be trouble along the line. Not because the man before him looked vicious or illicit or cruel, but because there was something so idealized in his whole countenance that it would be difficult to keep his promise to himself.

It felt like he was splitting in half, torn between two impulses. One part of him trended toward such extremes that it would naturally be the progenitor of its own destruction; desire, and hunger, and sating without satiation, up until the end. The other side, sensible and disciplined, guarded from past wounds… better to never taste and never desire what could be his.

Better to have loved and lost…

And so he broke a rule, a hard-line, well-defined directive by which he conducted his life and his work, in pursuit of nothing certain, and everything to lose. A little thing that didn’t look as though he had it in him to love in turn the way he could love and had loved. The kind of cautious, flighty thing that couldn’t commit. He expected this young thing would be quick to love and quicker to seek his pleasures elsewhere, the world too large to settle for anything too soon, too bright for any one thing to be sufficient, too filled with the wisdom he had not yet earned about love and life and the ties that bind.

The little devil was bookish. He knew nothing about anything more than useless old words and other people’s feelings and experiences. Even with his cultivated bookshelves, he knew there were things that could only be learned and appreciated through hard-won experience. He would not be the breaking-grounds for this tepid-blooded monster to learn about his preferences and sexuality and pass along for a younger model.

But how could he not? Why not try? Why not test his own mettle against the character of someone too weak to wound him? As long as he did not give himself…. nothing could be safer?

~

He feels too deeply.

~

He feels too empty.

~

In the end, it was he who could not commit to anything, he too skittish to stay with one person for too long. What did that say about him, that every relationship felt like chains dragging him back down in slavery, like sweet addiction that he never wanted to surface from?

He had nightmares about it months before he let Videl go. And how understanding, that little schoolmaster, small and bookish and beautiful. Some things were too beautiful to be enjoyed. Some things too wonderful to remain. Nothing lasted forever. Try and part on a good note. Tear away before it hurts too deeply. Never give yourself up. Never give anything up. Never give yourself away.

He missed those long fingers and long horns. He missed the graze of claws against his surface, so wonderfully fulfilling. He missed the very nature of a partnership where someone else could touch him in turn… where he could let someone in like that, disarming and terrifying and vulnerable and unsafe as it was.

Again.

Then apart. Like a pebble skimming the surface of the pond. The lightest touch-down, the merest moment of bliss, togetherness. then apart again.

He missed that sharp smile, that sharp wit. His tongue was purple, and his heart was too. He would read poetry to him, and sit quietly with him. And he appreciated classical music.

No. Too close. Too quick. Again.

Then apart. Skim. Surface. Never let him in.

His cats missed him. God, that wasn’t fair. The bastard had ingratiated himself to the cats. And the poor things, too stupid in the ways of the ‘real world’, the world of monsters, the world beyond meal and play and sleep, had integrated him into the family as another daddy. Had assumed a kind of object permanence that shouldn’t have been permissible for someone who wasn’t even there that long.

Coffee. Then upstairs. The cats, of course— it wasn’t—

Purple was the colour of deceivers and liars and thieves and cheaters. It was the magic associated with ‘Charm’ and ‘Presence’ and ‘Pressure’ and ‘Bewitch’ and ‘Entangle’. Purple was used to trap people in mazes, twist their minds, make them fall in love, make them do anything for the user. If he wasn’t so certain…. no, never in his darkest moments would he accuse such a baseless thing. But the prejudice sat on his heart for those dark moments when it was hungry to search for some reason to fling him away.

Why was he so patient? Why was he so kind? Why hadn’t he found someone who could settle down with him and sate whatever needs and desires he had that he could not fulfill?

They went ten years like this. He could easily do this forever. Never having to decide. Never having to commit.

~

the sharp flick of the whip—

~

the soft glide of a gloved hand along flesh—

~

He was sold into slavery when he was small. In retrospect, he did not suppose it was to be long-term. But at the time. At the time it seemed great and cruel. Crueler still with the memory of divinity and worship. There were people he trusted, humans. And the humans decided that he, in his splendor, in his wandering, his beauty, was both most precious, and nothing precious at all. And they took him, and they gave him away. They tied his hands together and put a rope about them so they could pull him behind a camel.

The people he eventually went to had an old faith as well. Theirs was that the rarity of living fire was a divine blessing for their people. If you consumed their body, you had a higher connection to the divine. You took their power and their ability for your own. You could become a great warrior with a piece of living fire inside your body.

So they said. They underestimated him. They preyed on the young and the weak, he supposed. But he was not so young and not so weak anymore, and by this point in his life, he had tasted violence, and knew how to deal in it.

He refused. And he broke his chains. Later, he wished he had done more. Later, he wished he had burned their whole village down. Each and every one of them. Each and every one who had eaten a predecessor. His whole being crawled with the magnitude of it only when he was away and safe again.

~

His right hand—

~

His left—

~

He loves books. He read voraciously on the surface. The expanse of his understanding of Russian originated in novels and poems written and spread via samizdat. French came before English, both from the tip of the continent before he’d even ventured up into Europe. Japanese before a smattering of Chinese, and that, for his lady-love. They had other shared languages, and he thinks she preferred he never knew too much about her proceedings, illegal or otherwise.

Books informed him of the world and the human psyche in ways he could never interact with. They helped him form connections between poets and artists, the disenfranchised of humanity. He would write to them, clumsily, his left hand drying the ink before it even swept across to form new characters, trying to tell them how their words had a power over him, a power that he willingly gave them. And they loved him before they even saw him, before they knew what he was.

Before things so soured, he had made lovers of many of them, and friends of many more. When he went into exile, when he gave up on the world and its peoples, he took books with him to remind him of what was worth saving from the human race.

Paper and fire seem like the worst possible combination. The control he developed for even that was something of a struggle, rolling the boulder up the hill, defiance of nature and its laws. This was precious and worthwhile. At his worst, those words still held value for him, sweeping him away into other worlds, expanding his mind and his understanding, exposing some glimmer of virtue when the world’s horrors choked in on him. Words must be printed on paper, to expose how delicate they are and how much work must be constantly undertaken to preserve and cherish.

He never took the step to master the words and make new things of his own. He was always too scared. His gushing letters were more fan-tributes than returning the sounding call, but ever afterward, he would try words and their synonyms and close seconds and their permutations, taste them with his mouth, think about them too hard, put four or five together where one might do, too in awe of how many choices, too anxious about pinning down the exact meaning in the flutter of meanings. It was too large, a cosmos of words that he could not hope to make his own, they were wild things, and he appreciated them in their wildness, and those who could hope to tame them.

He still collects books, down in the underground, but they need more love and restoration to settle next to their carefully maintained leather-bound brethren. Every new book is a wonderful new world to him. They are all jealously guarded as a dragon protects its hoard, treasured for more than their obvious delights.

~

Dominant—

~

Control—

~

He loves music. Even before the toe-tapping dance-inducing action-and-reaction that it demands, music became an intrinsic part of him. Melody taught him the air-vibrations, the not-light, that bridged the gap in communication to human language, human speech. And before that still, before that was something more wonderful. Something that tugged at his heart in ways that nothing else could.

He made his own music, but there was something about the music made by others, with instruments designed to make different noises, and people whose entire occupation was to make those noises in harmony with each other. Something in the way that people could be so swept up in the muse of those noises only they could create, and translate into noise that everyone else could appreciate.

For the longest while, his travels through Europe were stalled by hungrily attending live venues of music and orchestra. He loved bars and cabarets, street musicians, whatever he could find. The discovery that humans had managed to record music to play the same moment over and over again without magic… book money went to obtaining a record player and recordings. He loved piano. He tried to teach himself; it made his fingers feel large and clumsy, and it was wonderful to push himself more and more, though he did not have the spread to match the masters, nor the speed, nor the confidence.

A bar is not the best venue for classical music, but he still keeps a jukebox that plays a selection of pieces he approves of, and at every possible opportunity, he has someone come in to play, someone come in to tune up the dancehall piano with the roller sheets of hole-punched music, someone put together a new hole-punch music card to test out.

A silent bar is an uneasy bar. A silent home is uncomfortable. Lonely. The only place that stays silent is the basement, where one shouldn’t hear anything at all.

~

Submerged. Submissive. Subconscious.

~

He remembers when he met Him, the love of his life before there was any other. He was small then, and he was helpless and hopeless, and willing to give up. The world, in his understanding of it, was unkind. Later, when knowledge of it bloomed before him, when he had explored it, he would expand that word to many variations. It was still unkind, but he knew more accurately, more fully, how unkind it could be, the many varieties and variations unkindness could take.

But he was the kindness to his helplessness, to his despair. He reached for him, and the feel of their hands meeting was such a strong pull, such a delicious conflation-conflagration-combination of presence and desire and oneness that he did not want to draw away, he did not want to let go. Where their bodies met, their glow had mixed and blurred, His red on gold, gold on red, orange spreading between. 

And he was confident and charismatic and charming, everything that he was missing, everything that he was not. He was so much of a leader, here to save him, here to make them better. On sight alone, he knew him as a brother, as a friend. And he did not have to be alone. They were wonderful together. They were made for each other.

They spoke and they taught each other and they laughed and walked on and on through blazing sands, growing ever-closer, ever more in love. When the sun set, they could no longer hold back. It was self-destructive, but they lost themselves in each other, in the moment, the heat of each other, the heat of their own passions, and where their touch trailed, it was orange, the effects they had on each other. They were drunk on their love. There was nothing more but this, nothing but each other. Nothing but this one perfect moment between them, where they knew what they were and what their place was and where they would go.

~

He doesn’t believe in anything anymore.

~

There must be something out there. There must be something to pin hopes and dreams on.

~

You can only depend on yourself.

~

To be unable to rely upon anyone…. a world of nothing but self-assurance would be too cruel. He’d rather believe in something than nothing at all.

~

The only thing that is certain in life is nothingness. The only thing that is constant in life is change. And all motion trends toward the eventual heat death of the universe. The hotter he burns, the colder it will be when he is gone, exhausting the energy from the oxygen, from the materials that had potential converted to action, wasted away. His existence, a blip.

~

There must be some way to inject meaning into life. But how? With action? Reciprocity?

Love?

~

His name was once Djinni.

He had been weak and pitiful and lonely once. He hid in the shadows of the dunes and the mountains, too scared to share his light. The rain had battered his shelter and his form. It pooled in ways so dangerously close to destruction. He first caught sight of himself in those pools, small and golden and new.

He had no family and nothing to teach him. He had no words and no ways to translate the deep feelings he held inside of him. It was only when his brother appeared that he knew what language was at all, and it was a way to form connections and bonds beyond the self, a way to communicate everything that was large and painful and bright and terrible and wonderful. His brother named him, and put a word to a concept as difficult to construct as ‘identity’.

His brother was a bold force, dynamic and mesmerizing. He was like a storm, sweeping in, overpowering, changing everything in his wake. He remembered their kisses, their hands, their touches, their bodies together, how he unfolded under him, their light before the moon’s. Their light, which was his light, red and gold and orange. Their love was fierce and unforgiving, so fleeting, so painful. From the moment they decided on this course, it was a fatalistic farewell, the mantis feeding on its mate to sustain itself. He took him inside and fed on him with every pulse of light and heat and feeling and togetherness. Never be alone again. Never be hurt again. Promises to himself that he would break, but promises he made out of fledgling love, protection and hurt and comfort. Together. They would be together.

When he woke up, he was alone, and he knew.


End file.
